A Review of 2009

As is the tradition at this time of year we review the year according to The Jerrychicken Diaries and uncover a wealth of topics and assorted rubbish that surpasses all understanding…

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January – We dined out on Bruce the Dwarf stories, the North East town of Blyth was dissected at length and summarised as being shit, the virtues of Tommy Gunn vs Action Man were discussed and we concluded by virtue of much evidence that Tommy Gunn was by far the shoddy relative, I thought Art Cards would sell, they didn’t, I explained that one of my next-generation-up relatives was suffering from dementia and how loopy she had become, I painted a cold day that Jodie and I had spent in Edinburgh just before New Year, and explained how it was when my parents first ventured abroad on a 1970s package holiday.

What I didn’t explain at all at the time was that our close friend Chris had become dizzy in a pub one Friday in January, later that week he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, it all started in January.

February – We discovered that Brian, our dads Walter Matthau to his Jack Lemmon, had died probably on the plane bringing him home from Benidorm two years earlier, its not a very good grapevine around here, we spoke of Michael and his false legs, we spoke of collecting birds eggs, playing football on a cricket pitch, how a small puppy managed to shit inside my video recorder, I told you all about David Asquith, the boy in our class who was the least likely recipient of the title “Gig Monster” ever due to his being in the St Johns Ambulance and being at every gig in Leeds by default, I opened up my own space on Artgallery.co.uk, and reminisced on Phil Hills 40th birthday party, the day he left his wife for a much younger model.

And in real life we all visited Chris in hospital and tried to help when he came home and we took him out in a wheelchair one Friday night for the most memorable Friday night out ever, Jesus did we laugh a lot that night…

March –  We spoke of Irvin in Australia and his horde of money buried in the garden and how he corrupted his daughters dog into having a liking for tea at 4 o’clock every morning, I spoke of my exploits in Barbados, of my lack of need for a passport these fine days, of how one of our Hindu neighbours once shoved twenty bhaji’s into my open arms and ran away, we spoke of Kennedy’s record shop in Leeds and one of his sons contacted me afterwards, and we spoke of Billy Butlin and none of his relatives contacted me at all and in a long series of posts I recounted the days of the Felling Mafia.

And we had a board meeting and we decided to place our family business, the one that my grandfather had started, into the liquidation process and frankly none of it mattered in the slightest to me for on the very next day my schooldays chum Chris died of his illness in Wheatfields Hospice and frankly, nothing has really mattered since.

April – We started the month with a funeral and from that funeral was spawned the seed of an idea that it might just be possible for a gaggle of 52 year olds to cycle across the width of this country in two and a half days to raise some funds for Wheatfields Hospice, and no-one laughed, well not to our faces anyway. I was also made redundant and then re-employed, Suzanne was too although she was not re-employed and has not been employed since, I think she’s liking the fact that she is not employed anymore and that we can just about scrape our way through the monthly bills on my wage, I think she is liking it too much.

We spoke of driving lessons, 1970s style, and we mocked millionaires and their horrible choice of interior design, I explained all about eating the back out of easter eggs, discussed religion and the nutter of a vicar who married us all of those years ago, I explained all about our trip to Las Vegas in 1974 and how my dad and Ralph went to see Elvis for free and thought he was rubbish, we took poor old Jake for a long Easter walk and he couldn’t stand up for a week afterwards.

May –  We complained all month about how the Job Centre employed just fools because they were denying that Suzanne had worked these past twenty-odd years and therefore did not qualify for benefits, how wrong they were but it took longer than May to get it sorted, we saw the design of the t-shirt that we would use on our great plan to cycle the width of England, we discussed the elephants graveyard in France and Pepe Hernandez in Benidorm, I reminisced about a Volvo that I once bought that lost money quicker than HBOS, and all the girls in our little group of friends walked the midnight walk on Jodies birthday to raise funds for Wheatfields Hospice raising a couple of grand in Chris’s name, laying down a challenge to us lads to do better in July.

June – We discussed Dennis at length, Dennis the tourette’s service engineer, and we finally received confirmation that Suzanne had actually been working these past twenty-odd years (something that we had already realised some time ago) and was therefore qualified to receive unemployment benefit and we got some tax credits too, happy days. I recalled how my friend from school lived in a sweet shop and also recalled how that sweet shop would often be wrecked when one of the inmates of our local mental hostel would visit with pocket money only to “fit” on the floor with excitement, I read a very sad newspaper story about a ten year old girl running a 10K run for a cancer charity after her own mother had died and then realised that I knew that young girls father my old mate Charlie Smith, too many people were dying this year.

July – The month in which eight of us set forth in hurricane conditions to cycle across the width of this country in the name of our departed soulmate, to say that we all enjoyed the ride would be to understate the affair, it was a great weekend, we loved it and each others company and we raised just a smidgen over £4000 so all was well in the world.

I discussed Barcelona and moaned on a bit about telephone canvassing calls, I tried to get a car loan but no-one wanted to know, we talked about Pussy McNeil the teacher who never taught me a single thing, and Dan inserted into my head the idea that we might want to cycle the Hadrians Wall route next summer, like a fool I accepted his challenge.

August – I wrote a poem in honour of Dave Green, a singer who would often sleep off many a skinfull of ale at our house, I mentioned Brian our old next door neighbour who sold Lada’s and we resurrected the post on “How to piss off an australian” a post that still gets loads of hits most weeks around here, I saw a chav wedding and laughed at them, we looked at days out for free in Leeds and Bradford and summarised that Bradford was a free city and Leeds was not, we travelled up north and we went to the Edinburgh Festival for one day only and we talked of Charlie Smiths Austin Allegro.

September –  I discovered that I had a sports injury, a clicky knee, which fortunately healed itself later, I explained how company IT geeks work and revealed how we were disciplined at our high school with the aid of a block of wood, the gas cooker story took another airing and I listed all of the things that I have missed doing because of judgement decisions. The great back boiler disaster of ’68 was uncovered and “he came back a cowboy” still generates lots of hits for some strange reason.

It was my 53rd birthday, an unremarkable event, and we discussed my early career as store-boy, how I set fire to the photocopier in my first week at work,  and the sandwich shop owned by the most argumentative shopkeeper in the world and a three part series explained how the Queens Silver Jubilee holiday of ’77 killed my first car. We discussed haircuts, the magic razor comb of doom, our mad dog and my mothers knitting habit.

October – Amanda was 21 years old and so the story of the day of her birth was revealed, we visited Tynemouth and found a place we’d love to live in (if only) and visited my grandparents grave for the second time in 30 years, I watched some batshit loony on TV try to pretend that he is a serious politician with his policy of “send the buggers home”, and the binmen in Leeds went on strike for a long time and hardly anyone noticed.

I got stuck for a very long time in a motorway jam and very nearly had to use a thermos flask for toilet needs, we discussed the Bronte Ladies and their nefarious cleaning job and catalogue shopping and I blagged a free ticket to the rugby league grand final which my team won.

November – We discussed dentistry and how my childhood dentist would fill anything as long as you mother signed the NHS forms, The Woodman came under discussion as our crap pub of choice as teenagers whilst The Fox still holds a dear place in our hearts as our pub of Sunday Lunchtime choice, I bartered for a table cloth of all things, and Maureens incredible baps made an appearance and with tags like the ones I used still head the listings of  ”most popular searches this week”.

My fathers choice of sporty car and the terms of my borrowing of it were explained as were my fathers gag books, I explained how Workington was a town where Darwins missing link could still be found and a week later it was hit by a devastating flood which wiped out all of its bridges and killed a policeman – don’t ever try and tell me that this blog does not have influence on a higher deity.

December –  dental problems beset my mouth, I discovered that you could shop in Asda for painkillers at 2am, and I finally abandoned the very expensive dentist for one who did NHS work, Neds generous use of the company expense account at last years company christmas “do” was discussed and he was not allowed such leeway this year, our grandmothers christmas treats were discussed as was the battle between the two maths geniuses in our class at school, we discussed canaries and budgies.

I explained how my early forays into the world of showbuisness were thwarted by hiding under the christmas tree during the school nativity play, and explained how I accidently became a member of the school choir despite lacking in vocal skills, the Great Yarmouth holiday on one pair of underpants was explained in depth and my plumbing talents were uncovered, and my fathers well-worn sayings were described with the aid of sub-titles for non-Yorkshire folk.

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And after all that what was the search term that was used the most on this blog site ?

Ken Goodwin.

No, I don’t understand it either.

So good fookin riddance to an awful 2009 and heres to 2010 being an improvement (it can’t really be much worse, can it ?)

Happy New Year